Mark Shuttleworth: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say." He's right. Lots of interesting insights in this blog post - I may not agree with everything Ubuntu does, but at least it's doing something.

Canonical is only getting flack because they are no longer pandering to enthusiasts. Android is open source but developed behind closed doors, it is pretty successful. What has Desktop Linux accomplished? I love KDE, but I have never met anyone outside a LUG who has even heard of it.

Come to BC, Canada. We expose ~13,000 students to KDE3 every year. And about a third of those get to experience KDE4.

Unfortunately, we'll be migrating the KDE3 desktops to XFce this year, instead of KDE4.

There are many big Linux rollouts, there is a few in the hundreds of thousand system range. Again, I ask what this has accomplished. How many people using your systems care that it is running KDE, or have ended up migrating to Linux at home?

The fact that you're migrating to XFce really just shows your deployment is about cost, that is fine but I am sick of seeing the only Linux offerings in stores being extremely underpowered low end machines. How can Linux impress when it is confined to targeting people who are cheap?

We've received many comments from graduating students complaining about the lack of Linux in the universities around here. Especially the lack of NX Client access to their accounts, from home. We've also received similar comments from staff members that have moved on to other districts in the province.

We've also noticed a lot of student netbooks running Linux. And many Linux .iso files in student download directories.

So, while I have no definitive numbers, there are students from our district using Linux at home.

I am sick of seeing the only Linux offerings in stores being extremely underpowered low end machines. How can Linux impress when it is confined to targeting people who are cheap?

The thing is no one is going to buy a 3000usd machine with nvidia titans in SLI inside it to run linux. Cheap facebook machines are all that you can rely on really (talking about desktop market). If you pay 3000usd for a computer you damn well expect it to run the latest call of honor: battlefield not tux racer and openttd (a great game, not knocking it here).